[Linganth] Semiotics of Perspective: a pair of online lectures

[SLA Online]

Dear colleagues,

We are happy to invite you to *Semiotics of Perspective*
<https://cscs.uchicago.edu/semiotics-of-perspective/>: a pair of online
lectures by Susan Gal (University of Chicago) and James Costa (Sorbonne
Nouvelle) on June 2 and June 9. Please register here:
https://bit.ly/SemioticsofPerspective. More information on the lectures are
below.

*Friday, June 2, 2023 (9am Chicago | 4pm Paris)*
Susan Gal (The University of Chicago)
*Erasures of Perspective: How the ‘Voice from Nowhere’ Gains Linguistic
Authority*
Moderated by Janet Connor (Leiden University), with discussant comments by
Andrew Graan (University of Helsinki)

*Abstract*: The terms “perspective” and “point of view” remind us that
human vision is directional and limited. Thomas Nagel’s title The View from
Nowhere captures the impossible desire to escape those limits in accord
with the ideology of objectivity in 19th to 21st c. philosophy of science.
“View” is important in that title, but “nowhere” is more so: the desired
yet impossible escape from social situatedness. What if we define
perspective not visually but as a range of discursive voices that
biographical persons have access to and typically take up? Voicings reveal
different aspects of “perspective” than vision alone. I suggest that the
erasure – or the attempt at erasure – of a text’s social voice, can make it
seem “objective,” free of interestedness, of “bias.” Claims to
authority-as-objectivity are as important in everyday life as in philosophy
of science. How are such voicings communicatively created? How do they
entail whole worlds of people types, text types and social relations? In
this lecture, I discuss interactional practices in an Austrian town that
exemplify how erasure – and comparison of voices – achieves linguistic
authority in arguments among kin; in direction-giving to locals and
strangers; and in “graftings” of opposing opinions in political advertising.

*Friday, June 9, 2023 (9am Chicago | 4pm Paris)*
James Costa (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
*From Dangerous to Endangered — A Mere Question of Perspective? Endangering
Dangerous Highlanders in Walter Scott’s *Waverley
Introduced by Constantine Nakassis (University of Chicago), with discussant
comments from Jack Sidnell (University of Toronto)

*Abstract*: The most commonly accepted categories linguists and
anthropologists use for analysis are often also an effect of perspective.
In this lecture, I wish to show that “endangerment”, now often accepted in
our disciplines as fact, was constructed through a perspectival change, one
that took place within the space that R. M. Trouillot called “the savage
slot”. Based on an analysis of Walter Scott’s *Waverley* (1814), I show how
Western perspective on the Savage slot shifted from fear to curiosity, from
seeing those occupying that slot as dangerous to endangered. This shift in
turn allowed for an apparently aperspectival approach to develop in salvage
anthropology and documentary linguistics. Scott performed this work on
Highlanders in a novel that was key to transforming the Highlands and
making them fit for Romanticism in the 19th and 20th centuries. His novel
later served as a model for other such changes of perspective, in
particular Cooper’s (1826) *The Last of the Mohicans* for example.

***
*About the Semiotics of Perspective lectures*: These two lectures are part
of a larger project, Perspective: Vision, Discourse, Ideology, comprising
linguistic anthropologists, sociolinguists, and semioticians in Paris,
Toronto, and Chicago focused on the question of perspective. Perspective
has featured as a central analytic object in fields as diverse as art
history, film studies, and literary studies to the philosophy of science,
phenomenology, feminist criticism, and the anthropology of ethics. It has
also emerged as a key concept within linguistic anthropology and
sociolinguistics to understand the situated, political, and relativistic
nature of discursive action. Thinking across questions vision and
visibility; voicing and translation; and ideology and worlding, this
project — consisting of a year-long reading group (AY 2022–2023); this
lecture series (June 2, 9); and an intensive three-day workshop (June
19–21, 2023) — is devoted to articulating an ethnographically situated
account of the semiotics of perspective in social life. Perspective:
Vision, Discourse, Ideology is supported by the University of Chicago’s
Paris Center, the University of Chicago’s Department of Anthropology, The
Center for the Study of Communication and Society (University of Chicago),
LabEx (Sorbonne Nouvelle), and the University of Toronto’s Department of
Anthropology.

https://cscs.uchicago.edu/semiotics-of-perspective/

-- 
*Society for Linguistic Anthropology Online*
Digital Media Directors: Catherine Tebaldi (Universite du Luxembourg),
Shannon Ward (University of British Columbia Okanagan)
SLA Social Media Manager: Nora Tyeklar (University of Texas at Austin)
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